Home for a Rest
by Neko Kuroban
Summary: Horatio is not a man who is unfamiliar with beauty.


**Home For A Rest**

**Neko Kuroban**

* * *

The sight gives him pause.

Horatio is not a man unfamiliar with beauty. He is well acquainted with the flush of ardor heating a maiden's fair complexion; he can clearly recall the sensation of Gwendolyn's skin quivering beneath his touch. He has been before swept up in dalliances and the one doing the charming, oft at the same time. There were ladies before Gwendolyn, of course — his heart is not hard when he thinks of the dark, curling hairs at the nape of one's dusky neck or the neat turn of another comely enchantress's ankle, but none had ever so rivaled either her beauty or the feelings she stirred within him.

He is not a man unfamiliar with beauty, but this is an entirely different sort.

The youth curled in the chair calls to mind tales he has heard, half-forgotten stories of gods and mortals created to fill the cold spaces between man, myths made to chip away at the darkness after night settled in. Was it a trick of the light, some deception of the sun through the leaded windowpanes and the wash of the fire smoldering in the grate? His eyes have never before bowed to an illusion, but perhaps here in this new environment — and here his thoughts curtail themselves immediately as a pair of cool blue eyes

(_nothing at all like Gwendolyn's_)

flicker to him.

The curious inspection lasts but a moment, before the youth returns his attentions to his book. It is a used library tome with binding that had long ago cracked under the hands of some careless student, one who is likely bearded and grey by now. Horatio wonders at the book's contents and — before he thinks better of it — asks.

He has all but resigned himself to not receiving an answer when the response finally comes: "Luther. It's actually very—" and he cuts himself off with such suddenness that Horatio has to smile. The boy, this strange Ganymede, notices the quirk of his lips and must interpret it as mocking, for he refuses to say anything more, try as Horatio might to engage him.

"I'm Horatio," he offers at last, still smirking.

"Good for you."

Horatio only laughs.

* * *

This is how it happens:

The serving girl's name is Annelise, but she, wintry eyes melted with mirth, tells him pointedly that he might call her Anni. She giggles when he insists that he could never call a lady by something so familiar. "I am nothing so fine as that, sir," she informs him, resting her elbows on the tavern's countertop, and it sounds like a promise. Her sleeve falls back from her wrist to reveal her forearms and the yellow-violet bruising, so much like fingertips, marring her skin.

He finds himself wondering who put them there. Did a customer grab her roughly? Her father? Her husband? A lover?

He could probably ask her directly. She hangs on his every word, her round Bavarian face rapt. There is no courtly play of manners, no token resistance. She does not meet his quips with ironic barbs of her own nor does she simper and call him _lord_. Her interest is clear and upfront, and at first it flatters him.

When a drunk calls her over, he watches the sway of her hips, outlined by a clinging gown the color of rust, until a commotion across the tavern catches his attention. When he whirls about, he finds himself faced with the youth from the library. Their eyes meet for but a moment; Horatio is the first to look away.

The girl returns. She is beaming up at him, and, curiously, all he can think of is a dog he had when he was a boy.

It had been the runt of its litter and had been turned out by the man who bred the mastiffs for hunting as too weak. _The bitch is bad, boy_, the gamekeeper had explained, emptying a bucket of the scraps even the dogs rejected into the pigs' sty. Horatio had been disgusted to later find the pup being tormented by a gang of lads. The notch the breeder placed in its ear had been torn further open and its leg had sustained damage. Horatio had been furious; fighting just one of the boys had been enough to make his point clear. The poor cur was so grateful for simple kindness that it took to its new rescuer at once.

This girl, naïve and open, is like that.

Disgusted with himself, he withdrew from his soft leather pouch several coins enough for

(_an hour with a whore_)

his pint and then some before bidding her a goodnight.

* * *

The feeling of self-recrimination is not so easily shaken, however. Guilt stalks him like the cat he had never had, bandy-legged and persistent. Drink has made him clumsy — which, naturally, escapes his notice until he trips over an uneven floorboard on the covered porch.

"That was graceful," comes a voice. It is hard to see in the lantern's flickering glow after the warm golden light inside the inn, but his eyes slowly adjust to the dimness. Enough to see the pale figure of the youth from the library, at any rate. He has to be Horatio's junior; he still possesses the coltish quality of adolescence, the awkward look of one who hadn't reached their full height, suspended in stasis between boy and man.

"You should see me fence," Horatio responds immediately. What can a man do but laugh at himself?

"You fence?" Is that a note of genuine... something Horatio prides himself on is his ability to read people, but suddenly all he is aware of is the crippling need to be ill. When he starts down the stairs, the boy and his guilt follow, silent Siamese cats preying on the edge of the shadows.

The boy is not quiet for long. He strikes up a continuous stream of talk, which he seems perfectly capable of carrying on without Horatio's input: "There was another youth I learned to fence with, a lad very much like myself. We had been learning for about week with weighted weapons when a jester — he dabbled with some alchemy, you see — thought it might be a good idea to demonstrate magnesium to a pair of young lads who were...impressionable. He showed us the way it took to flame and told us that it made metals lighter. This, of course, was reason for my friend to fill his blade's hilt with magnesium."

He is pale enough that he appears luminous in the moonlight, all azure eyes and alabaster skin and white-gold hair. He could easily have been one of the fae who lived between worlds or a vampyre or a ghost or Phoebus himself or perhaps just a slightly awkward university student. (It is the latter he most closely resembled, it must be confessed, when Horatio stopped to retch in the gutter.)

Something Horatio had taken to be a bundle of rags stirs. The gaunt, dirt-streaked face of a starving child peers up at them. She says something in the language of the land, but her accent is thicker and her dialect alien. Perhaps it is merely his intoxicated state, but it seems as if her words bled together in a stream of harsh-sounding consonants and alien vowels. He glances over to his companion, who raises his fair, slender brows quizzically. The child's raised palm, however, is universal.

Horatio fumbles for coin, but he only has gold and silver left. No vagabond is worth that.

His shadow lacks such qualms, it seemed. "Take it," he is saying in Deutsch, pressing a sovereign into the child's hand.

The response is high and panicked, accompanied by a childish shake of the head that sends matted, filthy hair flying. "_Nein,_ _nein_!"

The boy reaches out and wraps the beggar's fingers around the coin. "I really must insist."

"Why did you do that?" Horatio demands in a more familiar tongue when they had finally been permitted to move on. He does not wait until they were out of earshot; there is no way that an uneducated peasant child could understand their foreign words.

Narrow shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. "A child's life is important to God, if not to man."

He seems bothered by this line of questioning, however, and Horatio permits the subject to fall off, despite the harsh words that laid in wait on his tongue. _You know that little girl will only be robbed because of what you just did, don't you?_ The dark-haired man longs to demand. _If not worse._

Silence descends as they approach the stone gate that encompasses their sanctuary. Wittenberg's bulk looms above them, a reassuring solid weight that promises stability — or at least the appearance of it. The lad steals a glance up at him, and, though their difference in height is not great, Horatio feels uncomfortably tall in comparison.

"What happened to your friend?" He prompts finally.

"Right. Our swords sparked in practice, and the magnesium went up. The look on his face was nearly worth the ruined practice. Goodnight."

And, with a queer little smile over his shoulder, he was gone.


End file.
